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The Dumb and the Skillful

By Anthony Onica

Gnomish machines are capable of incredible achievements and spectacular failures. Just like your luck game.Image used with permission by linxz2010 @ http://linxz2010.deviantart.com/
Gnomish machines are capable of incredible achievements and spectacular failures. Just like your luck game.Image used with permission by linxz2010 @ http://linxz2010.deviantart.com/ /
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The Skillful

It doesn’t take a genius to predict something evil coming your way when you’re low on health. Whether it’s a windwalked assassin, a foe bursting from the forest, or death from above, you know you’re on that ragged edge of disaster. God help you if there’s a trigger happy Tinker on the other team. I’ve been pegged with a heat seeking missile before within 3 HP of my life.

And that’s what makes it so exciting! Taking that risk to snag a few extra exp and keep your lane strong oftentimes gives your team an advantage, so long as you don’t die. Being low health also magnetizes kill hungry heroes away from their designated lane and towards you, which can be an effective way of either deflecting attention from a push or setting a counter-gank to the one you know is coming.

Or die to live another day. Respawn takes some of the sting out of death, but not much.
Or die to live another day. Respawn takes some of the sting out of death, but not much. /

Juking the judgement 

Teetering on that edge is a little more ballsy when playing against heroes like Zeus, who can nuke you with electric fury from anywhere on the map. If you don’t have windwalk or some other means of going invis, you’re low hanging fruit. But a perfectly timed blink can put you in a pocket of trans-dimensional space outside of the Thundergod’s Wrath.

The shuffle/splitting effect of mirror image skills, when timed perfectly, works similarly. I wouldn’t recommend either as easy ways of avoiding Zeus’s shock therapy, but as you see below, Phantom Lancer manages to time things just right.

Sidenote: again, tech support is working on making this gif less bite sized. Better quality here.

“Send us your dumb and skillful,” ~ the Statue of Liberty

If you have plays that illustrate either pure dumb luck or the more admirable orchestrated variety, send them to us here at DireDota HQ. We’ll feature them on the site, and give you (and your guild, if you so desire) a shout out.

Submissions can be sent to: anthony.onica@fansided.com

For more on DOTA 2 strategy, visit our hub page and follow @diredota on Twitter.

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